So spoke Chris Packham, one of the country’s most prominent and most uncompromising environmental activists, in an interview with Amol Rajan as part of the latter’s series for Radio 4 and iPlayer Radicals.

I have to admit that hearing him say this shook me up. I decided that the next few blogs, the first few of 2026  will be about this most pressing of issues. It seems to me that  the world is so preoccupied  with other things, war, immigration, economics etc.  that perhaps it is easy to forget that the survival of our civilisations depends on the way we approach this problem more than any other. If the climate really is at breaking point then this should surely be our first and paramount concern. The question comes back at once, what does a poet, or any artist, do to help, where do we start?   

There is no shortage of nature and environmental poetry out there and the first daunting problem I encountered  is how to say something that has not been said before.

For now I will leave the poets aside, and turn to the activists and hear what they have to say.

At COP30 in Brazil in November 2025 activist Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez (quoted in The Guardian) identified four truths that I have summarised here:

We have more than doubled greenhouse gas emissions instead of cutting them. We’re on a pathway to assassinate half of all living creatures.

We don’t need more reports, dialogues, committees of experts, roundtables. We need action.

It is all one crisis; the climate crisis, the biodiversity crisis, the land crisis, the ocean crisis, the plastic pollution crisis.

We are literally paying criminals to kill us. We’re giving subsidies to fossil fuel producers, when we know everything they produce kills us, quickly or slowly.

We live in a political climate of denial where rich men deny these truths in their own self interest and all of us (and by “all of us” we mean every living thing) suffer.

I hope for a year in which we will hear loud voices shouting the truth, dispelling the hatred and division, calling for action on climate breakdown. As Lauren Zunica writes in her wonderful poem Everything is Going to be Amazing:

This is the year of ‘Quit the Dumb Shit.’

Let’s do just that!

My reading life

Among my birthday and Christmas presents this year were the new collection by Deryn Rees Jones, Hôtel Amour (Seren 2025). I met Deryn  some years ago when she ran a Ty Newydd course I attended and I joined her launch for this collection on Zoom. More of this next month when I have read it. My other book present was Alice Robert’s Domination. (I have a secret passion for archaeology and history.)

My writing life

has been on hold in December as I celebrated a significant birthday and Christmas: a busy and enjoyable time. However my new Mslexia diary has forced me back to thinking about writing and yesterday, New Year’s Day I began. 

Hare in the headlights 

Nothing specific to report as I have been having a break. This is very good thing to let myself do and not feel guilty about not writing..

‘Bye for now